Opinion Brief: Thursday, February 23, 2017

Tonight’s Opinion Brief is brought to you by the Humanitarian Coalition, now 7 Canadian aid agencies working together to save more lives during international humanitarian disasters.
______________________

Good evening, subscribers. The honeymoon was over months ago. But the best way to handicap the Trudeau Liberals’ chances in the 2019 election is to look at the parts of the country where voters opted in large numbers to back the Liberals in order to prevent another Harper government. Places like B.C.

Tonight, in a sweeping report from the West Coast, Michael Harris tells us that Trudeau is in deep trouble with the left-leaning British Columbians who abandoned the New Democrats and Greens for his charms in 2015. The reason: an aggressive resource development agenda that many see as sacrificing B.C.’s interests to those of Alberta’s oilpatch. “‘I don’t think that Trudeau understands the people’s attachment to this coast. If I were him, and I thought this could hurt the coast, I wouldn’t do it. Yet he wants to increase tanker traffic sevenfold.’ — Former Liberal environment minister David Anderson.”

And Janoah Willsie and former Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page deliver up a scathing piece on the federal government’s continued failure to fund child and family services for First Nations at the same level non-Native communities enjoy — a lapse they say is claiming lives. “This is a national crisis. There are broad-based commitments to help. Canada must move immediately to comply with the legal orders and establish agreements with First Nations and provincial governments based on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child.”